Why don’t you get things started?

Chaos all the way down.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Muppets. They are my Roman Empire, my professional sports team, my one-who-got-away. I’ve always loved them, even during the years when I had to fast forward through the terrifying scene where Doc Hopper tries to fry Kermit’s brain in The Muppet Movie. Because beneath all the jokes and chaos, there’s a soft vulnerability to every character, a sense of loneliness that never went away no matter how many friends or fans they had. I identified with that so strongly as a kid and, despite medication and knowing better, still do today. Like my favorite humans, the Muppets are flawed and funny and perfectly happy letting their freak flags fly.

I realized at the beginning of the semester that I hadn’t taken much time to talk with the membership kids about creative practices. As a writer, quilter, knitter, and person whose best friends love a self-help book, I think about creative practices all the time; it only recently dawned on me that teenagers probably don’t. So last week, I gave The Wordshop’s high school members a short presentation about Muppet Theory.

You might remember this; it was all the rage online about 12 years ago and originated with an article in Slate. The theory basically says that all Muppets—and all people—can be divided into two categories: order and chaos. They’re usually presented in pairs to balance one another. Kermit is an order Muppet; Miss Piggy is a chaos Muppet. Bert is an order Muppet; Ernie is a chaos Muppet. Fozzie, Gonzo, Rizzo, and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew are all chaos Muppets; Sam the Eagle, Scooter, Rowlf, and Beeker are order Muppets. (Beaker is just trying to do what Bunsen instructs him to do. Beaker does not make the chaos on his own.) If you look at your own relationships, you’ll probably see that you’re one and someone you’re close to is the other. (I’m the chaos [duh] and Justin is the order.)

I took this a step further with the kids to help them figure out how their Muppet type may be preventing them from actually writing. In the uber-order kids, I see procrastination in the form of planning. They have outlines upon outlines and miles of character notes. They’re scared of writing (because writing is scary!). So we’re working on being just a little more chaotic and not planning everything to the hilt. We’re going to jump in and take some chances. After all, Kermit was stuck in the gulag until the rest of the gang staged a jailbreak. Sometimes chaos is the answer.

Conversely, the super chaotic writers need a little bit of order. I can spot the super chaotic ones by how many times they change their stories before they’ve put any words on the page. Their ideas are enormous, way too big to be contained on a single piece of paper/computer/book. I encourage them to try; just scratch out a scene before their ideas go -poof!- into the ether. They can always come back and make it better later. Even Gonzo does dress rehearsals.

I honestly wasn’t sure if my message got across. Nobody had watched any of the Muppet videos I’d sent, there was a bunch of cross-chatter and laughing, and I was struggling to keep our virtual member engaged on a poorly propped-up tablet. I left the room to get dessert, and when I came back, my own Robin/Kermit, Gonzo, Piggy, Bunsen/Beaker, Janice, and Rowlf had lots of questions for me about how to emphasize their characters’ order and chaos traits and how relationships work when two orders or two chaoses are paired together. This Dr. Teeth decided to count that as a win.